Politics & Power Quote by Jurgen Habermas

Post-9/11 America didn’t just fear the next attack; it rehearsed it on cable news. Habermas’s line catches that rehearsal as a kind of political tell: the more vividly the media narrates anthrax clouds and invisible toxins, the more it exposes the state’s uncertainty about what it’s actually facing. The word “betray” matters. It frames the spectacle of preparedness not as responsible vigilance but as an inadvertent confession, a leak of epistemic weakness.

Habermas is writing as a theorist of the public sphere, so the target isn’t only the government’s intelligence failure; it’s the way government and media form a feedback loop that converts ignorance into imagery. When leaders can’t “determine the magnitude of the danger,” they compensate by staging danger at maximum resolution: diagrams, “expert” panels, color-coded threat levels. Detail becomes a substitute for knowledge. It feels like control. It reads like competence. It is, in his diagnosis, the opposite: a performance built on indeterminacy.

The subtext is a critique of democratic legitimacy under stress. If a government can’t name the threat with precision, it gains incentives to govern through atmosphere - managing fear, justifying extraordinary measures, and widening security powers in the name of an undefined enemy. Habermas’s European vantage point sharpens the warning: when the public sphere is saturated with catastrophe scripts, deliberation gets crowded out. Citizens are nudged from participants into audience members, watching imagined scenarios stand in for accountable policy.